Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not
assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy
the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to
preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to
defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired
on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states
for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy
but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for
a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his
party's nomination for President, he sketched his life:

"I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents
were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second
families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth
year, was of a family of the name of Hanks.... My father ...
removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year....
It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals
still in the woods. There I grew up.... Of course when I came
of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write,
and cipher ... but that was all."

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working
on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at
New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War,
spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the
circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him,
"His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest."

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom
lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas
for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas
he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican
nomination for President in 1860.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national
organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats
to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation
Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within
the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even
larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the
military cemetery at Gettysburg: "that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
from the earth."

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded
an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President
was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down
their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural
Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D. C.: "With malice toward none; with charity for
all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind
up the nation's wounds.... "

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's
Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow
thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result,
for with Lincoln's death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity
died.

U.S. Presidents: United in ServiceTake a look at presidential biographies made by kids and videos about service from the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation.

Sixteenth President
1861-1865

Born: February 12, 1809, in Hodgenville, Hardin County, Kentucky

Died: April 15, 1865. Lincoln died the morning after being shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. by John Wilkes Booth, an actor.